Written poetry is worth reading once, and then should be destroyed. Let the dead poets make way for others.
ANTONIN ARTAUDAdmittedly or not, conscious or unconscious, the poetic state, a transcendent experience of life, is what the public is fundamentally seeking through love, crime, drugs, war, or insurrection.
More Antonin Artaud Quotes
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Those who live, live off the dead.
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There are those who go to the theatre as they would go to a brothel.
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We must wash literature off ourselves. We want to be men above all, to be human.
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The truth of life lies in the impulsiveness of matter. The mind of man has been poisoned by concepts. Do not ask him to be content, ask him only to be calm, to believe that he has found his place. But only the madman is really calm.
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Cruelty in the theatre is unrelenting decisiveness, diligence, strictness.
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How hard is it, when everything encourages us to sleep, though we may look about us with conscious, clinging eyes, to wake and yet look about us as in a dream, with eyes that no longer know their function and whose gaze is turned inward.
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I am adding another language to the spoken language, and I am trying to restore to the language of speech its old magic, its essential spellbinding power, for its mysterious possibilities have been forgotten.
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You are quite unnecessary, young man!
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By suicide I introduce my design in nature, I shall for the first time give things the shape of my will … now I choose the direction of my thought and the direction of my faculties, my tendencies, my reality.
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In consciousness dwells the wondrous, with it man attains the realm beyond the material, and the Peyote tells us, where to find it.
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There is nothing like an insane asylum for gently incubating death.
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In our present state of degeneration it is through the skin that metaphysics must be made to re-enter our minds.
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I have need of angels. Enough hell has swallowed me for too many years. But finally understand this–I have burned up one hundred thousand human lives already, from the strength of my pain.
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Actors are athletes of the heart.
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No one has ever written, painted, sculpted, modeled, built, or invented except literally to get out of hell.
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The idea of a detached art, of poetry as a charm which exists only to distract our leisure, is a decadent idea and an unmistakable symptom of our power to castrate.
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When we speak the word ‘life,’ it must be understood we are not referring to life as we know it from its surface of fact, but to that fragile, fluctuating center which forms never reach.
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A real theatrical experience shakes the calm of the senses, liberates the compressed unconscious and drives towards a kind of potential revolt.
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[defines a madman as] a man who preferred to become mad,in the socially accepted sense of the word, rather than forfeit a certain superior idea of human honor.
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All writing is garbage. People who come out of nowhere to try and put into words any part of what goes on in their minds are pigs.
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There is in every madman a misunderstood genius whose idea, shining in his head, frightened people, and for whom delirium was the only solution to the strangulation that life had prepared for him.
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The fixation of the theater in one language–written words, music, lights, noises–betokens its imminent ruin.
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I see in the act of throwing the dice and of risking the affirmation of some intuitively felt truth, however uncertain, my whole reason for living.
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So long as we have failed to eliminate any of the causes of human despair, we do not have the right to try to eliminate those means by which man tries to cleanse himself of despair.
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Excuse my absolute freedom. I refuse to make a distinction between any of the moments of myself.
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Hell is of this world and there are men who are unhappy escapees from hell, escapees destined ETERNALLY to reenact their escape.
ANTONIN ARTAUD